One important note at this step: It can be very easy to inadvertently plagiarize from a competitor — maybe a definition, the structure of the post, or even a turn of phrase. You’ll read something, it gets stuck in your head, and a day later, you write it down without realizing it’s from another source.
My strategy for avoiding this is to not spend a ton of time reading the competition — I really do just skim — but your mileage may vary, so do whatever works for you.
I took down some notes about israel telegram data the newsletters I’ve written for over the past few years — questions I had, questions I didn’t know I had until I was knee-deep in an email newsletter platform, and lessons learned.
For instance, at a previous job with a very small team, I found myself face to face with some of the more technical aspects of running a newsletter. I had no clue what “DKIM” or “DMARC” meant, and as far as I knew, “SPF” referred to sunscreen.
So when I started working on a different blog post about B2B newsletters for HubSpot, I knew I wanted to include something about the technical side of newsletters without going into too much detail.
I reached out to a HubSpotter on our MarTech team who was able to give me some high-level advice on what marketers new to newsletters should consider from a technical perspective.
This is just a fraction of the information I got from a 15-minute Zoom call:
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Sometimes you don’t know what the importance of a facebook business manager account you don’t know, and reaching into your own experience can help uncover questions your audience will have as they dive further into the topic at hand.
4. Research the topic and any trends.
If you have access to a data and research tool like Statista, IBISWorld, or similar, get in the habit of running a few searches. This didn’t turn out to be a major source for this particular topic, but I did find some data on personalization, which was one of the subtopics I touched on in the blog post.
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I also searched Google Scholar for “email newsletters in marketing,” restricting results to anything from 2023 or later. I came across a December 2023 paper entitled “Personalization (In)effectiveness in email marketing” from a journal called Digital Business.
This ended up being a background resource for me rather than something I quoted in my article, but in my opinion, it’s worth taking a few minutes to check scholarly journals — you never know when you’ll come across somebody doing something brand new in the field.
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5. Interview subject-matter experts.
This step can be intimidating if you don’t know subject-matter experts. Here’s a few of my tricks I used to find people to talk to about B2B newsletters:
- I started by asking the HubSpot #marketing Slack channel: What are your favorite email newsletters? Lia Haberman’s ICYMI and Alexis Grant’s They Got Acquired were both mentioned several times, so they went on my list.
- I searched LinkedIn for “B2B email marketing” and found other experts and top voices.
- I went through my own network and found that I knew a few people on the technical side. I asked them if they had any suggestions and recommendations.
- I asked other newsletter writers at HubSpot if I could talk to them, and if they knew anybody they could introduce me to.
6. Analyze the performance.
It’s good to check the performance of your piece after a month, though I’ve also worked in places where we whatsapp database monitored daily performance — so let your industry and KPIs guide you. If you’re writing timely (as opposed to evergreen) content, your pageviews will probably peak within the first week or even sooner.
If you use HubSpot CMS, clicking “view post details” will let you monitor metrics like lead conversion rates, revenue attributed, and other metrics. HubSpot also shows you the breakdown of traffic sources, which can help you fine-tune your distribution in the future. (Google Analytics, a commonly used tool, has similar metrics.)
